samarakroeger's reviews
550 reviews

this man loves his seeds and could wax poetic about gardens for days on end.  i don't love the subject quite as much but that's okay, too.

this is simply gay trench warfare fanfiction!!!  I do NOT understand the supposed "literary-ness" of this book -- did you even read the second half?  it goes off the rails in the most unbelievable fashion!

I don't actually have a problem with fan fiction, it just wasn't the tone I was expecting here at all based on the hype.  it could be a positive or negative element to different people.

similar vibes to Édouard Louis + Annie Ernaux + Luca Guadagnino … all of whom I like.  very sad and economically depressed French countryside vibes + a coming of age love story that’s doomed to fail — what’s not to love???

listen — Tessa Dare writes great palette cleansers that are unserious in the best way.

Will I remember it?  Probably not.  But that’s not really the point, is it. 

kinda juvenile but still fun nonetheless 

happy to redeem my pride month romcom track record!  I haven’t been in the mood for romance much lately, but when the pms sets in… tears will be shed (warranted or not).  while parts of this were definitely pretty cringey (and ~quiRkY~), I’m really glad I finally got around to picking this up. and tbh seeing that it was published in 2020 makes the harry potter references moderately less concerning (p sure JK hadn’t fully gone off the deep end publicly at the time of writing — it would be a wild thing to include without caveats in a queer book now). 

wanted to like this book so much but I genuinely hated the writing style!  plus, baseball is an inherently boring sport (which I find kind of charming tbh), and allll the baseball talk did not hold my interest.  love the rep, though 

I think Isabel Wilkerson’s writing just isn’t for me.  there’s an ungodly amount of repetition in this book and it seems like it just wasn’t properly edited.  She did SO much research for this project and then presented it in a disjointed and fairly convoluted manner. It would have helped to either split up each of the three narratives into distinct sections OR for her to go through everything in chronological order, interspersing the wider context with the personal interviews. I disliked Caste for very similar reasons — except that book was even more repetitive. There’s only so many redundant topic sentences one casual reader can take, you know?  If you were worried we forgot the same basic biographical information we’ve been told several times already, maybe it would be prudent to edit it for length … then we’d read faster and have less time to forget it in the first place. 

I do think that the choice to follow three different people who represented larger trends was a good one, I just wished it was organized as a narrative with more of a natural flow and structure. I’ll stick to listening to Wilkerson’s podcast appearances in the future (which she is actually very good at). 

5 star information/research presented in a 2 star format = 3.5 I guess

horrifying. never got over how the unofficial miners were referred to as “artisanal miners” — what a euphemism!

anyways, this is a must-read and will stay with me, I’m sure.